“Concerto senza frontiere”: il Sud del mondo si ritrova a Napoli. Integrazione e transculturalità nella canzone napoletana odierna

Abstract

As a crossroad of different cultures, Naples occupies a culturally relevant role in the Mediterranean. Once land of emigration, the city has now become a land of immigration, a cosmopolitan metropolis where different peoples live together in a transcultural context. The recent Neapolitan music describes this contemporary process of integration, recounting the social and cultural changes. Mixing traditional popular rhythms with new sounds and using functional code-switching, the Neapolitan song can therefore be considered a typical example of world music. The article, based on a corpus of 15 songs from 1993 to 2017, aims to highlight and analyze the characteristic subalternity of southern Italy as an element of connection with other Mediterranean populations; the image of the Mediterranean Sea as connecting point between cultures; the process of integration and peaceful coexistence as themes of recent Neapolitan songs.